ONE – October 3

Late-summer flowers are almost gone. Phlox, brown-eyed susans, the delicate, weedy daisies that no one can bear to pull up by the roots—all of these have begun to fade. The herbs in the garden behind the Quadrangle Club, too, are dying. Picking basil, I find each straight stem beginning to soften, leaves curling and edged with brown. Still, I gather as much as I can—a bear with berries. Hyde Park’s geese prepare to fly south for the colder months, laying siege to the Lake Front Trail, and, biking to the Loop, I swerve to avoid the obstacle course of their poop.

On Tuesday, our first day of classes, M and I pedaled to Promontory Point for a sunrise lake jump. Skin screaming into goosebumps, I stripped to bra and underwear and padded cautiously across the slick rocks, leaning over the edge to check for metal beneath the surface. I had almost talked myself out of submerging when I found just the right spot and heard M’s “1…2…3!” from the rocks above me. A crouch, a maneuver, a breath and a splash and I was in—decidedly inelegant, completely euphoric. M took a video, so I know.

I am glad of this video now, of their pictures and mine, just as I was glad of the coffee we shared, made on their camp stove and poured into my mugs. We sat quietly in the wave-sounds, and I watched their face slowly, softly illuminated despite the line of clouds that hovered, smokelike, parallel to the horizon. For a breath, two, the sun glowed massive and orange, only to disappear upward a moment later. At 6:45am, a kind of sunset.

Yesterday, too, clouds hovered close to the horizon. I left my bread dough to proof in the empty oven until 7:20am and, hands protesting the cold of the brakes, the jolt of the uneven pavement, biked to the Point’s not-yet-sun-warmed rocks with green tea steaming in a thermos in my backpack. At 6:48am, light began to bleed like ink onto the sky. Rays reached up to meet the clouds and vanished behind them. The egg-yolk sun followed, filling the narrow gap for a moment again, for two; I took a picture before it followed the light behind the clouds.

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